A Happy Gigster!

Hi there,

Well, I know I still owe you another entry re my trip to NYC, but I have to talk about tonight's gig. Yes, your friendly correspondent is a Happy Gigster tonight!

Just got back from a set at Wonder Bar, a venue in Boston's Allston-Brighton neighborhood. We helped to kick off the annual Boston Music Festival, a weeklong celebration of everything from Jazz to Folk to Rock to World Music. At several bars & clubs all around the city. A really cool idea, but the publicity for it was pretty random; it’s such a great idea, people should know all about this for a month or more. Anyway….

Our bandleader Mary Casiello is a grad from the Berklee College of Music and writes her own material. Mary is a wonderful talent, and it’s always fun to play bass in her band because her songwriting incorporates a wide range of moods, interesting harmonies & chord progressions, and rhythmic textures. Terry, the guitarist, and I have considerable freedom to improvise riff ideas and explore tonal properties for the accompaniment of Mary’s songs; e.g. for one song I crank the highs and scoop the mids to get a bright, slap-like sound out of my bass (I’m strictly a fingerstyle player, plucking with my index & middle fingers; I can't play decent slap bass at all, so I don't) and for a couple tunes I play mainly in the upper registers, as legato as I can, to approximate a sort of cello sound.

As a support musician, I appreciate that I get to experiment with different sounds, feels, rhythms, and tones – like the way The Beatles used to work in their early-to-middle period, whoever has the best idea – that’s what we play, which is energizing and inspiring. Some of our rehearsals have consisted of a handful of tunes with ongoing arranging by the whole band; playing for awhile, starting again with new ideas, then revisiting it later if we feel like it. Sometimes we also jam on it a bit, so we can stretch a given song out for a coupla minutes.

Tonight’s gig bore the fruit of these rehearsals – we were really “on”, pretty tight with the material; we played three new songs live for the first time. I ploinked out a couple clams on one of them (painful wince….), but I pretty much nailed the other two (insert sigh of relief here). They were well-received, which is nice: as the songs are brand-new, we’re breaking them in live, so I’m sure the arrangements will be tweaked here and there as we go along and the songs will just get better & better. The crowd was smallish but as time went on more people turned up, and they were digging the music. Yeah!